The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has become a global migration hotspot. The absence of records results in both a lack of epidemiological data on the main health problems affecting these populations (e.g. the real effects of COVID-19 on these groups are unknown) and difficulties in terms of developing health policies and delivering services (e.g. how should COVID-19 vaccines be deployed in these populations?).
“It is important to understand what is happening to these migrant populations,” explains Ana Requena-Méndez, assistant research professor at ISGlobal and principal investigator on the project. “We want to understand what their health needs are, whether health programmes take their specific circumstances into account and whether they are accessing services well, so that we can act accordingly. This is why we need to have access to health data on this population.”
The project “Transforming Data Collection and Surveillance Around Vaccination (Including COVID-19) and Key Diseases in Migrants in the MENA Region”, also known as “MENA Migrant Health”, aims to address this problem by using an innovative digital tool—the Migrant Health Country Profile tool (MHCP-t)—to facilitate the monitoring of key indicators of the health of the migrant population in six North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia) as well as Yemen. MHCP-t is capable of collating migrant health data on multiple diseases and vaccination coverage from each country’s health information system as well as from other sources, such as national registries, research projects and data collected by NGOs.
